How to build a sliding barn door closet

Design

Building a sliding barn door for a closet can look great and be affordable. This is a step-by-step guide on the diamond-pattern design, and how to hang the doors from ceiling rafters.

Total cost: $800

$450 steel hanging hardware
$350 wood

sliding barn door closet diamond pattern

Materials

Ceiling-mount hardware tracks
Sheets of plywood for the backing of all hanging sections
Pre-weathered boards for the decorative center sections
Tongue-and-groove cedar paneling for the outside white sections
2×6″ lumber for the frame of the white sections
23-gauge pin nailer (optional)
Liquid nails
6″ MDF floorboard (optional for aesthetics)
Cast-iron handles
Soft close sliding door mechanisms
Philips Hue Lightstrip with a motion detector

Step 1: Mounting the hanging hardware

Our biggest dilemma was how to mount doors for the closet. Normally there’s a solid wall with a hole for a door, and sliding/barn doors are mounted to the wall (think of a pocket door). We instead had just a gaping open space in our bedroom.

We needed a way to mount the doors to the ceiling, not to a wall. Unfortunately our rafters ran parallel to the plane of the doors, and of course, we wanted the doors about smack dab in the middle of the rafters. We mounted 2″x4″s between the rafters in the ceiling, in the attic, to bolt the doors into.

sliding barn door closet motion lights — View looking up, standing in the doorway, closet on left side. There’s 2 tracks running the whole length of the room, with the 2 center weathered door panels mounted to one, and the side doors mounted to the other. The rails are bolted directly up into the ceiling with L-brackets. We put an MDF baseboard behind the rails for aesthetics.

Ceiling-mount barn door hardware

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$140 for black powder-coated L-brackets, pulley rollers, end stoppers, floor guides, and all nuts and bolts. Joining multiple 5ft kits worked well. The rolling is very smooth and quiet!

Step 2: Making the Center Weathered Barn Doors

The center doors were made using a sheet of 5/8″ plywood for the backing. We found pre-weathered boards from Home Depot that came in a pack of a variety of colors for the facing boards.

sliding barn door closet cutting plywood — Cutting the 5/8″ plywood backing to size.

sliding barn door closet building door weathered boards — The sets of weathered wood from Home Depot. You could easily take cheap wood like from pallets and stain them a variety of Minwax colors. I did in fact verify that that the stains are very close to Minwax Jacobean, Special Walnut, and Weathered Oak.

sliding barn door closet putting diamond pattern together — Laying out the weathered facing boards. Boards are cut 45 degree angles from the lengthwise middle. If you swapped our center doors, they’d make a perfect diamond. Don’t worry about the length of the boards yet–they can hang off and be cut at the very end.

sliding barn door closet cutting weathered planks at angle — Cutting the weathered boards at 45 degree angles.

sliding barn door closet gluing boards — Fix each board using liquid nails and 23-gauge pin nails.

Liquid Nails Glue

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Bonds wood to wood.

sliding barn door closet nail gun — 23-gauge pin nailer.

sliding barn door closet pin nails — Pin nailer holes are pretty much invisible.

sliding barn door closet trimming end circular saw — Trim off the weathered boards when you’re done, after letting the liquid nails set for 24hrs.

We wanted a border to hide the edges where you’d see the plywood meet the weathered boards. We used the same weathered boards for the border. We flipped the weathered boards on their short side, so the ~5/8″ edges faced out. Rip the boards to the thickness of your plywood plus weathered boards, ~1.25″. Don’t forget to take the size of your border into account when initially cutting your plywood.

sliding barn door closet nailing border — Liquid nails + pin nailer for the border, just like before. Done!

Step 3: Making the Side Doors

The side doors are relatively simple and plain, and painted the same flat creme color as the rest of the room. They consist of a border of 2″x6″ lumber with cedar paneling in the center.

Sidenote: Our side and center doors overlap by about 1.5″, so there’s no gaps between the doors, and it prevents light leakage. Take any overlap into account when calculating the width of your doors.